Philosopher Ted Honderich argues that the Labour Party’s current philosophy is rooted in 18th-century conservatism

NEW Labour has so often declaimed a vacuous proposition of the long political tradition of conservatism. It was first produced by Edmund Burke, MP, that Irish and philosophical renegade of the 18th century, who got a good pension for his propaganda. The proposition is that in the good society we are to be against change in fundamental values, conserve them – but we are to be for reform of things. He could never explain the difference.
New Labour has had a second distinction. It has not been a party that aspires to actual thinking about how society ought to be, as witness the early bumble about the Third Way. Thinking isn’t announcing inquiries, let alone prating about your good character. Thinking is a general logic, which is to say clarity, consistency and validity, and completeness.
New Labour, thirdly, has not only believed in but contributed to more of a human nature that demands as much incentive-reward as can be got, more and more. New Labour has also prated about freedom as if the subject needed no distinctions – in effect it has just enlarged property-freedoms and market-freedoms further, and reduced or not increased social and civil freedoms. New Labour, fifthly, to the extent it can, has preferred a degraded form of Burke’s true natural aristocracy to democracy.
Further, it has respected what has always been dignified by talk of an organic society, which is not one of certain kinds of organisation and reorganization. It has also been against the real equalities that matter. It has done nothing much about poverty. And it has been all for the obscurity of some people getting their desert, of course renamed. Finally, it has practised what Burke also recommended, an economy with truth. It has been horrible in that way.
Does an analytical inquiry into these various distinctions of the conservative tradition have the conclusion that New Labour is in the tradition? John Stuart Mill, if he did not succeed in defining liberty or liberalism, is remembered for perceiving conservatives to be the party of the stupid. Is New Labour in that tradition?
I tend to that idea, but without the drama of thereby laying a claim to a discovery of fact. In such as question as this one, it is close enough to being the case that there is no plain fact of the matter. The situation is common, and sometimes discussed by philosophers in terms of real vagueness in the world. Was the war won or lost? Is that minority a part of this people? Is that terrorism about religion? There may be a necessary indeterminateness in a good or the right answer.
To pretend it is not a matter of judgement whether the New Labour is conservative, to be merely declarative, is to fall into the dimness of that same party, the illusion or faking of rational confidence. To declare New Labour to be conservative would be to fall in with the habit of a party that has made it harder to distinguish truth from other things. Total obscurity and ambiguity in talk of ‘reform’ is now the outstanding and inescapable example.
Other questions remain, one about a rationale or fundamental principle or best summary of conservatism and of New Labour – what it is that unites collections of distinctions? Conservatism’s rationale is not rightly described as self-interest. Socialism and all political traditions are self-interested. What is unique about conservatism is something else.
What is New Labour’s rationale? Well, it is not the Principle of Humanity, about taking rational steps to get people out of bad lives. The party is not for our paying the effective and economical price of rescuing those in deprivation, distress and wretch-edness. It regards that as a denial of realism, of an invented real world, as all opponents of humanity always will.
Is New Labour’s commitment to a selfishness hidden from itself by kinds of self-deception? New Labour’s distinctions do stand in connection. It could not be entirely content with the conservatism in it, because of its inherited impulse to decency or humanity. The result has been its peculiar covertness, obfuscation and yappiness. What matters, though, is not that disappointment, but what the New Labour Party did to many who are the subject of that morality in which the Labour Party struggled, the greatest of moralities, that of humanity. The New Labour Party has failed nearly all of them. There is a smell about its morality. There is a smell about it.

• Ted Honderich is Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London. This argument is taken from his latest book Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair? (Pluto Press, £17.99).